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NBC reported recently that at a meeting last year with the Congressional Black Caucus a member told President Donald Trump that his planned welfare cuts would hurt her constituents, “not all of whom were black”. Mr Trump is reported to have replied: "Really? Then what are they?” If the president had not realised that most welfare recipients are white, he is not alone. And the media are partly to blame, for black Americans are overwhelmingly over-represented in media portrayals of poverty.

The poverty rate amongst black Americans, at 22%, is higher than the American average of 13%. But black people make up only 9m of the 41m poor Americans. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit focused on health care, found that in only five states for which it had data and the District of Columbia, were there more black poor people than white. Black Americans are more likely to be recipients of means-tested welfare programmes like...Continue reading

EVERY month Debbie Varnam of Shallotte, North Carolina, must pay a doctor’s bill. It is not for treatment. Ms Varnam is a “nurse practitioner”, a nurse with an additional postgraduate degree who is trained to deliver primary care. North Carolina, like many states, does not allow nurse practitioners to offer all the services they are trained to provide. Ms Varnam cannot, for example, prescribe the shoes diabetics often need to prevent the skin on their feet from breaking down. To do so, she needs the approval of a doctor. So Ms Varnam employs one. For about $1,000 a month, the doctor reviews and signs forms that Ms Varnam sends him. The doctor, she says, has a similar arrangement with five other offices.

Occupational licensing—the practice of regulating who can do what jobs—has been on the rise for decades. In 1950 one in 20 employed Americans required a licence to work. By 2017 that had risen to more than one in five. The trend partly reflects an economic shift towards service industries,...Continue reading

JUST before the end of the school day on February 14th at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high-school in Parkland, Florida, the fire alarm rang out. Most of the pupils and teachers thought it was just a drill. It was not: a gunman had pulled the alarm to draw out the maximum number of targets. The gunman killed 17 and injured more than a dozen, some critically. Local television stations reported that the slaughter appeared to be the worst mass murder in the history of Broward County, an affluent area north of Miami.

As that might suggest, America is running out of superlatives to describe its frequent gun massacres. The killing in Florida, whose perpetrator was later arrested, was a bad one. It was America’s deadliest school shooting in five years—since a man killed 20 children, six adults and himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut. Then again, looked at another way, it was merely America’s 18th school shooting this year. By the reckoning of the Gun Violence Archive, the...Continue reading

IF DEMOCRATIC strategists could build a candidate for Pennsylvania’s sixth congressional district, she would probably look something like Chrissy Houlahan. A 50-year-old former air-force captain, entrepreneur and chemistry teacher with Teach for America, Mrs Houlahan appears, crucially, to have been none of those impressive things for political effect. Until recently she had not contemplated running for anything. And if she had, she says, speaking on the fringe of a small gathering of voters in Valley Forge, a wealthy suburb northwest of Philadelphia, she would have considered herself unsuitable: “I’m a very private person and have never asked anything from anyone before.” The Damascene moment that brought her, and hundreds of Democratic women candidates like her, on to the campaign trail was Donald Trump’s election. “I was raised to respect democracy,” she says. “But I felt on this occasion the people had got it wrong.”

A 37-PAGE indictment against 13 Russians issued on February 16th by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is packed with damning, astonishing evidence that Russian agents meddled in the presidential election of 2016. Still, one passage stands out as a reminder of the perils faced by American democracy, and of how much is at stake as Mr Mueller’s probe unfolds in coming months.

The passage reproduces—apparently verbatim—what seems to be a confession by Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina. She is one of the Russians charged with creating multiple, false American identities, to post, monitor and update social media content designed to deepen racial and partisan divides and stoke Americans’ distrust in their political democracy on behalf of the Internet Research Agency, a secretive organisation funded by an oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.

We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke). So, I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with the colleagues,” Ms Kaverzina allegedly...Continue reading